Hurricane season 2026 starts on June 1. As of the date of this blog’s posting, that’s just 56 days away (plus a few hours). That’s less than two full months. Considering the lead time on manufacturing impact windows can take six or more weeks (or, at least on custom-made impact windows Florida homeowners can actually rely on), it’s critical to start preparing now rather than waiting for the last minute.
Why You Need Impact Windows: Florida’s Long History of Hurricanes
Every year, warmer Atlantic waters and atmospheric pressure changes bring with them an increased risk of hurricane formation from the first of June all the way to the end of November in what is commonly known as “hurricane season.”
In recent years, the occurrence of hurricanes making landfall in or significantly affecting Florida has gone up compared to previous decades. According to NOAA data, between 2015 and 2025, 11 hurricanes made landfall: Hermine, Matthew, Irma, Michael, Sally, Ian, Nicole, Idalia, Debby, Helene, and Milton.
By comparison, the 2004 to 2014 period saw eight hurricanes make landfall or significantly impact Florida: Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The thing is, all of those hurricanes were just in 2004 and 2005!
The 1970s and 1980s each only had three hurricanes that affected Florida, while the 1990s alone had six! The 1960s was a busy period, featuring eight hurricanes. That’s a total of twenty hurricanes in forty years, or about a hurricane every other year.
In other words, we’re on track to have more hurricanes impact Florida in 2000-2039 than we had hit us in the four decades spanning 1960-1999. Just ONE more in the next 13 years, and it’ll be a tie.
Considering that we’re averaging a hurricane every 1.42 years (though some recent years have seen multiple hurricanes make landfall in a single year), it’s highly likely that Florida will have more hurricanes in the first 40 years of the new millennium than the last 40 years of the previous one.
It’s not a matter of IF a hurricane will hit Florida, but WHEN the next big storm will make landfall.
What Is an Impact Window in Florida?
Impact windows play a huge role in protecting your home from the worst effects of seasonal hurricanes in Florida. However, what defines an impact window that makes it different from a non-impact one?
The biggest difference between impact windows and non-impact windows in the state of Florida is that impact windows are built and tested for compliance with the Florida Building Code (FBC) for installation in wind-borne debris regions whereas the non-impact windows are not.
You can often identify an impact window by its specific features and parts. For example, an impact window typically has two or more panes of glass, one of which will look abnormally thick because it’s actually two plates of glass separated by a laminate interlayer such as PVB (Polyvinyl Butyral) or SGP (SentryGlas Plus, an ionoplast interlayer material noted for extreme rigidity).
This layered design enhances protection for your home by not only using extra-strong glass to create a barrier between your home and the outside, but to add a semi-flexible barrier behind that, then another pane of glass, and yet another pane of glass in the sash behind that!
Even when the first layer of glass cracks because of a massive direct impact, there are still more layers of protection to prevent wind and rain getting into the home. Impact windows are designed around these “failure states” because the engineers who created them understood that any sufficiently massive impact will shatter even the strongest glass. By adding layered protection, the risk of any object getting through the whole window is massively reduced.
The broken glass even adheres to the laminate interlayer material, helping prevent any sharp storm debris from making a direct impact and reducing the amount of glass spall in and around the window so your home has fewer broken glass hazards after the storm. And this all assumes that the top layer of glass breaks. The durable glass used in impact windows tends to be far less susceptible to breaking than the glass used in non-impact windows.
Non-impact windows, on the other hand, often use only a single layer of glass to reduce costs and shipping weight. An impact that could cause a chip or crack in impact glass is going to go right through the non-impact variant with ease.
Impact Windows Florida Homeowners Can Rely On
With hurricane season drawing nearer and nearer, Floridian homeowners need to install impact windows they know they can rely on. The challenge is that not all impact window companies are created equally.
There are a lot of big name national companies that specialize in doing the job the cheap way, not the right way—and many of those don’t even have the decency to pass on the savings to the consumer!
They’ll hire subcontractors who have no experience installing windows, let those third-party employees operate on your house without proper training or insurance for cheap, then say ‘too bad, it’s on you’ if anything goes wrong with the install by pointing the finger at the underqualified temps they hired for the job.
In some of the worst horror stories we’ve heard from customers who came to us second after going with a big-name national brand, they didn’t even get the windows they were promised! Rather than Simonton Windows, for example, they got ‘8000 series’ windows that were marketed as being ‘like Simonton’ but were anything but.
You need impact windows Florida homeowners can count on installed by the most trusted team of installers in Tampa Bay. You need real name-brand windows installed by Karoly Windows & Doors.
At Karoly, we never subcontract work to third parties. Every one of our installations is handled by Karoly employees who are on our payroll and trained by our senior installation technicians. That’s how we can guarantee the quality of our installation work.
We also work extensively with Simonton and PGT products because we’ve tried and tested them ourselves. In our 25 years of being in business, we’ve tried out numerous brands of windows and doors to see what does and doesn’t work. Simonton and PGT were consistently the best impact window manufacturers we’ve worked with. After over 100,000 windows installed, it’s fair to say that we have extensive field data backing up these brands’ reliability.
Get top-quality impact windows installed by the best installers in Tampa Bay! Reach out to Karoly Windows & Doors to get started!
